Glamorgan Sport park

Over my eight months working on The Phoenix I built up a strong relationship with certain members of the sports department, who raised the point that the university didn’t really have any sort of advertising aimed at potential students from a sporting perspective. With such fantastic facilities on offer at the Sport Park, we suggested that we could make a 10 minute package which would appeal to prospective students which in turn would give the sports on offer at Glamorgan more coverage. As part of a group of three, it was decided that rather than having set roles of camera operator, sound operator and producer, we would instead combine our experiences from across our three year journalism course to produce something we would be happy to show possibly thousands of future students who wish to study at this university. We wanted to advertise the Sport Park as a whole, though paid particular attention to the football and rugby side of things – these are the two most popular and highest recruited sports after all. It was also our intention to let the video footage do as much talking as possible, with a real focus on team spirit, which with the addition of some narration helped give viewers all that they would need.We contacted various key figures at the Sport Park such as Steve Savage, Ian Jeffreys and also certain sports players, with Mike conducting interviews. It was then down to me to film various shots, such as the Steve Savage interview, and match action. I took the role of editing the footage when all the filming was finally complete, though as mentioned it was a real team effort to get the finished package at a standard we were each happy with. The filming itself was done over a period of a few months, in which time we visited the Sport Park on regular occasions in order to get an array of shots – whether that be day or night, a warm day or a cold day, we wanted to make sure we had a nice range of footage to work with. We were made aware of the merger which was taking place between the University of Glamorgan and Newport and kept this in mind when shooting and editing. We produced two packages: one with narration and one without, to ensure that we could easily adapt the package to suit a new target audience. I decided to major in print for my final year as this is an area I would like to one day move into, though right from the start of my Creative Industries project I wanted to be able to showcase the TV journalism abilities that led to my high grade in the second year - this project allowed me to do that to an extent, which I hope I have shown with my various camera shots and editing skills. We did encounter certain problems with the editing software which was unfortunate, and it meant that I would have liked to have made certain changes to the finished piece, such as certain overlays and varying sound levels, but it has still been finished to a level I am happy with handing over. On the subject of editing, I originally decided to include the song 'Hey Ho' by The Lumieers for the end montage which worked brilliantly, though because of music licensing it was decided that we would source our own music through Michael Hicks, who produced a guitar riff to go over the footage. This project has taught me all about the professional industry in terms of the TV facet of journalism, which, combined with The Phoenix work I produced, has left me feeling positive about the future. I have improved both my camera and editing skills, as well as my ability to work as part of a team to produce work for someone else within a deadline, and under specific instructions.